February 24, 2016

Whether you’re a customer service rep, product manager, or CEO of an SMB you need to stay on top of any issues and keep your customers happy. Tags and custom fields can help organize your incoming tickets but they can’t alert you by volume, which unfortunately means they can easily become a nuisance. For example, if the number of e-mails coming into your company are roughly around 10 per day, and chats are about 30, you know that if this spikes up to say 100, then you would want a notification to let management know to adjust staffing based upon those thresholds. Tags and custom fields can’t selectively notify you.

It’s the age old catch-22: You want to be alerted about important things but you don’t want to receive a bunch of pesky notifications. Well, Zendesk users rejoice because this is a dilemma no longer!

Here at Workato, we’ve been working with the folks at Zendesk to come up with a solution that can easily fit any use case. Now you can receive real time notifications based on the threshold you set via email or directly into the Slack channel of your choice. If you’re a manager who wants to receive an email to warn you when the volume of new tickets hits 10 tickets or you just want to have a Slack channel to easily track customer activity and keep the company notified every 3 tickets, this Workhack will make your job less complicated and more productive.

Get This WorkHack

What You Need

To apply this workhack to your business, you need a powerful connector like Workato to send information between your Zendesk account and your email or Slack on a timer. Workato calls its integrations “recipes,” which are a set of tasks that get work done across your apps and don’t require coding or an IT staff. If you don’t have a Workato account you can create a free Community account.

How It Works

After you create or sign into your account, you can activate these two Zendesk recipes in just a few minutes. You will define the threshold (and channel for Slack) after you click “Install” on the recipe page.

1. Set Your TimerThis recipe is set to check for your ticket threshold every 30 minutes. If you want the recipe to check at a different frequency, you can change the timer under the Trigger section, and again under Action 1 > Earliest Time Created. Make sure the time limit you set in both fields match or the recipe won’t function.

2. Set Your ThresholdThis recipe has the threshold set at 10 tickets. If you want to change it, you can do so at the bottom of the recipe under “Ticket threshold.”

3. Set Your Slack Channel

Right under “Ticket threshold” you’ll see “Slack channel.” Make sure to include any dashes in your channel name.

To receive your alerts via email, you can use this recipe and change the time, threshold and message in the email in the same manner as above.

The Details

You can also define which Zendesk channel you want these notifications from for both Slack and Email, so if you only want to be notified every 3 Zendesk tickets from the Zendesk Chat channel, you can specify in the recipe under Action 1 > Channel. You should also make a note in the message section of your email or Slack notification so you know that this notification is for a specific Zendesk channel.

Sending Notifications to Slack

You can run different recipes in different Slack channels. Let’s say you are a manager and want to be notified every 20 tickets in the channel “Website Issues” so you know when there is a problem with the server. You can easily set the recipe up to do so by choosing 20 as the threshold and setting it to the correct channel. If your customer service team prefers a smaller threshold, you could install the recipe again and have it alert you every 3 tickets in the channel “Zendesk Ticket Summary.”

What This Means For Your Business

The insights from threshold notifications will help you tend to your customers in a more proficient manner. A high threshold will immediately alert you to a problem like the server went down or a key feature isn’t functioning. A lower threshold allows a manager to easily track customer activity without receiving individual notifications, and a threshold set around the daily number of tickets you receive on average will keep the company informed of progress in a digestible way.

Smart notifications from Zendesk will lower customer churn and the customization of these recipes ensures that your use case can be met with ease!

What other applications do you want smart notifications from? Let us know in the comments.